Tea Party Turns Five

From September 2008 to February 2009 nearly $1.6 trillion America didn’t have had been spent by our government: TARP to bailout Wall Street ($700 billion), plus the auto bailouts ($80 billion), plus the Stimulus to bailout Democrat constituencies ($787 billion). When would it stop? Who would end up paying for it? Anyone paying attention was deeply concerned. CNBC’s Rick Santelli was, and gave his now famous “rant:”

Within weeks, in fact five years ago today, the launch of the “Tea Party” in 30 cities emerged to protest this ridiculousness. Within two months, I had attended my first Tea Party protest — a rainy Tax Day protest in Trenton. It felt like being part of the early phases of a grassroots movement — regular like-minded passionate people without any clear political direction or organization. That would come in time.

By 2010, Angelo Codevilla wrote his famous “Ruling Class” article, laying out a philosophical explanation for a more populist brand of libertarian conservatism that the Tea Party represented. The elections that Fall sent a clear message by shellacking the Democrat Ruling Class in Washington. The momentum carried over little to 2012 as the Republicans, through whom the Tea Party chose to function politically, nominated a flip-flopping Massachusetts moderate in Mitt Romney. The Party stayed home. Obama stayed President.

Through it all, the MSM has thrown vile and unfounded accusations at the Tea Party. Yawn. The MSM didn’t create us, so they have no power over us, which kind of bothers them.

In the typical model of grassroots activism, the Tea Party no longer fills the streets the way it used to mostly because the movement has evolved from protest to politics. They aren’t merely trying to impact government, they are in government… just not in Washington yet, at least not in the numbers necessary to move us away from our perilous trajectory.

Mark Levin spoke earlier about the need for the Tea Party to fight on. It should be easy — with Obama defacing the Constitution and the Establishment GOP trying to expunge the Tea Party, the movement feels even more emboldened.